CHAPTER XV.
While here, two of our sergeants, in a drunken frolic, took it into their head to go and see their sweethearts in Wexford. When they came thoroughly to their senses, they were far on the journey, and thinking their crime would be the same, they entered the town. Their absence being discovered, a party was sent after them, and they had not been many hours in the place, when they were found, and marched back prisoners to their regiment.
We expected they would have got off, by being reduced from their rank; but the commanding officer seemed to consider their crime of too heinous a nature, to let them escape with an ordinary punishment. They were tried by a General Regimental Court Martial, and sentenced to be reduced to the rank and pay of private, to receive five hundred lashes, to be branded on the side with the letter D, and afterwards to be sent to (what is usually termed) a banished regiment. One of them was an intelligent man, who had been respectably brought up—the other a young man scarcely twenty years of age; the former did not live to go abroad—he died in Dublin, I believe of a broken heart; the other went abroad, but I never heard what became of him.
The impression throughout the regiment at the time was, that the sentence was most unreasonably severe, particularly that part of it that awarded the corporeal punishment. Will that disgrace to the country never be done away with? I am perfectly convinced it could be done without, and those who advocate it, must bemen who are either wofully ignorant of human nature, or whose passions obscure their reason, and induce them to act contrary to their better judgment; the latter is the most common of the two. I have known commanding officers who have acted in this respect rationally and wisely, while their personal feelings were not strongly excited; but who, when they were so, committed the most flagrant injustice.
Why should there not be a definite code of military laws for the army? for that abstruse, vague, and indefinable thing called ‘the mutiny act,’ surely does not deserve the name. I defy any two persons separately, to make the same commentary on it. In it so much is left to the private opinion of courts martial, that the sentences passed by them are often preposterously unequal: for instance, I have known a man tried by one court martial, and sentenced to three hundred lashes, and another for the same crime, without any palliating circumstance in his favour, sentenced to fourteen days’ solitary confinement. What are we to make of this inconsistency? It is evident it proceeded from the temper of the individuals composing the court.
If these things appear hard or unjust, why not rectify them, by attaching a definite punishment to every crime, at least as far as circumstances admitted? The business of courts martial would then be clear and easy; nor would officers feel themselves in the unpleasant predicament in which they are often placed. Corporeal punishment ought to be abolished altogether; I am perfectly convinced it could be done without. In many regiments we have strong proofs of the allegation; and the fact, that where punishment is most frequent, the men are the worst behaved, andvice versa, cannot be denied.
It cannot fail to humble a regiment to have one of their number flogged, and it ruins the individual. No man who has prided himself on his character, can look up after it: he bears a humiliating sense of disgrace about him for ever after,—‘a worm that willnot sleep, and never dies.’ My character, he will say, is gone, I can never hold up my head among my comrades; all prospect of promotion is lost to me, for should my officers at any future period offer it, how could I, who have been tied up, and my back lacerated before the gaze of the whole regiment, ever feel confidence to command those who have witnessed my disgrace, and to whom I have been an object of pity or scorn, either of which is alike humiliating to a mind not entirely callous.
Many may wonder at my warmth on this subject; but if they had, like me, seen the dreadful extremity to which it was at one time carried, they would cease to be surprised. Who that has ever seen a man stripped before the gaze of a regiment, his limbs bound to the halberts, and the knotted scourge lacerating his flesh, while the surgeon stood by to measure by the pulse the amount of human agony which the poor wretch could suffer, would ever wish to see it again?
The first man I saw flogged, received eight hundred lashes, for desertion—it would have been more merciful to have shot him. But men have been known to receive a thousand lashes before they were taken down from the halberts; and on occasions where nature could not bear the punishment awarded at once, they have been brought out again, and again, to have their half-healed backs torn open afresh! They have been known to faint under their punishment, and again be flogged into life! On other occasions their agony was lengthened out by giving the lash by tap of drum, allowing half a minute to elapse between each tap, and when the mangled back was cut through the skin, and the bare muscle quivered under the scourge, the only mercy extended was to inflict the rest of the punishment on some other part of the body! And yet all this was done under the eyes of people professing Christianity and civilization—who were yearly inundating Parliament with petitions against flogging negroes with a cart-whip—yes, while the blood of their countrymen was sprinkling a barrack square, andtheir cries were ringing in their ears! They saw it not—heard it not—their feelings were too fine for aught but distant misery. The groans of their tortured countrymen were given to the wind—no voice was heard in their behalf—no arm was raised to save. Yes, there were a few who vindicated the cause of insulted humanity, and they live in the grateful remembrance of the soldier; but their efforts were rendered ineffectual through the opposition of men whom I dare not trust myself to speak about.
How individuals can be found to stand up in the senate of a free and enlightened country, and vindicate this brutal and inhuman mode of punishment, is an anomaly not easy to be accounted for.
Thank God! the times I have described are gone past—men cannot now be treated in that manner without investigation; but still enough remains to make us wish its abolition. Though flogging is now seldom resorted to at home, I am afraid it is still too prevalent in our colonies abroad, and may in a great degree cause that debasement of mind, and habits of inebriation, which we observe in the generality of those soldiers who have been stationed long in the East or West Indies.
If any crime committed by a soldier in the army deserved corporeal punishment, the individual should no longer be a member of it: after such punishment, he ought to be discharged, as unworthy to be a soldier. It may be argued that many would then commit crime, when engaged in an unpleasant service, to get their freedom; but those who would say so, know little of human nature. Most men who have any character to uphold, consider disgrace worse than death; and if they had witnessed, as I have done, the reluctance with which soldiers, in general, left their regiment, when sick, even on the eve of battle, and what anxiety they evinced to join, when restored to health, they would think differently. Many schemers there are in a regiment, certainly; but under any circumstances they would be useless characters—there are drones inevery hive. To inspire and cherish the manly, honourable spirit I have described, it is only necessary to treat men as if they possessed it. Soldiers have their failings, and their prominent vices, it is true; but they generally lie on the surface, and their neighbours in civil life have this advantage of them, that they ‘have the better art of hiding;’ but in point of disinterested feeling, and generosity of character, I question much whether the soldier would lose by the comparison.
The besetting sin of the British soldier is drunkenness, (the parent of many others,) produced, in a great measure, by the leisure time which he has in general hanging on his hands. I am sorry the only effectual cure for this has not been pushed to the necessary length,—I mean urging the men to improve their minds, and affording them the means, which would not only make them more useful soldiers, but enable them to fill up their spare time with advantage to themselves.
As an instance of this, there were a few of us in the habit, instead of spending our idle time in the public-house, of walking down by the river side, carrying our books with us, and alternately reading and conversing. Some of our comrades who had been addicted to drink, sometimes joined us for the sake of the walk; and from the pleasure they derived from the conversation, and the new ideas awakened in their minds, they voluntarily gave up their old habits, and became converts to our system. We procured books on the various subjects to which our attention was excited, and although not quite masters of the subject, it would have surprised many people to have heard our disquisitions on Natural Philosophy, History, &c. Music was a favourite amusement also, and by forming small parties, we were never at a loss to pass the time, and when on guard, (the most irksome time to others,) we found it the most pleasant. Our number was not great, certainly, but a little encouragement and countenance from our officers might have done much. The detached situation of the regiment often broke up our party, but still wecherished the germ of intellectual improvement; and if I have in any way gained the start of my comrades in this respect, it has been by my application while in the army, for when I first entered it, my education was entirely confined to the elements of reading, writing, and arithmetic.
I know there are men who look upon the increasing intelligence of the lower classes of society with a fearful eye, considering it as the precursor of revolution and anarchy. The man who thinks so, must have a ‘worthless neivefu’ of a soul.’ Education, by improving the understanding and ripening the judgment, leads men to see clearly their own interest and follow it steadily, and of course will always render them tractable to the existing government, where that government is not tyrannical and unjust. None have any reason to fear the spread of knowledge, but those whose actions loathe the light.